Do you love music? Do you love music enough to spend three days in the endless Texas sun?
If not, you have no soul and should seek help, perhaps from gypsies. But for those of us less humanity-challenged, every year there's the Austin City Limits music festival. Spun off the legendary 34 season TV program with the same title, it's a nonstop, genre-independent orgy of sweat, song, and insobriety. With eight stages, there's between two and four bands playing at any given time, and the real challenge is trying to squeeze in seeing everyone you already know you want to, to say nothing of the myriad new bands you'll fall in love with.
I'm not quite self-absorbed enough to think anyone actually cares to read about everyone who I saw or detailed reviews, so instead I'll just discuss one of the neater green ideas they had. In addition to the usual overpriced t-shirts, they had even more expensive 'green' shirts with unique designs. However, money wasn't the only way to get one. You could get one for free by redeeming a full trashbag full of recyclables from the festival grounds. The end result: for probably 150 dollars worth of shirts they had a huge team of volunteers circling the park like vultures, pouncing on litter the instant it hit the ground. It got annoying at times since holding a beer in your hand turns you into a magnet for collectors, but it kept the grounds staggeringly clean. Particularly important since there are really only a few hours of daylight in the morning to clean before the doors opened at 11.
Recommendations past the jump...
Listen (these will become embeds once I figure out how to do them):
Nicole Atkins & The Sea: Gorgeous voice, classic style. As I learned when looking up her Wikipedia entry to find a good description of her work, she's a huge fan of both David Lynch and his regular composer Angelo Badalamenti. How awesome is that?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoCcnpbco58
Langhorne Slim: This video is one of his slower songs, but live he and his backup band the War Eagles are like a more mellow Rev. Horton Heat. The album, which I bought, doesn't quite hold up as well, but still worth a spin.
Sybris: Female fronted alternative rock. A bit reminiscent of early 90's alternative, but less whiny than your Alice in Chains or Pearl Jam. I liked them, and surprisingly so did Pitchfork.
As for other notes, Fleet Foxes were pretty much what you'd expect. If you don't recognize the name go run out and download it real quick, before you lose your indie cred. Stars and Iron & Wine were both a little too quiet for their timeslots, and both also had disappointing sound mixing issues. The Foo Fighters closed, and surprisingly did a hell of a job. I'd always considered them milquetoast college music for freshman girls, but live they actually rock. David Byrne still has it, and it's a bit of an indictment of modern music that the most exciting, creative, and unique moments of the entire festival were the performances of two Talking Heads songs that were written a quarter century ago.
